


Morning Hours

by Arsenic



Category: West Side Story (1961)
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-01 23:59:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2792411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arsenic/pseuds/Arsenic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a little character study about Maria, post-musical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Morning Hours

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kinky_kneazle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinky_kneazle/gifts).



Every morning, she wakes up forgetting. She wakes up thinking Bernardo will be there to tease her, Tony will be there to kiss in shadows and dream of light. Every morning, she sees the grime on the outside of her window, blocking the sun, and she remembers. For a moment, just that moment, she wishes the bullet had taken her too. She does not want to leave her bed, her room, does not want to see her mother's vacant smile, the way her father cannot look at her.

She gets out of bed, though, and dresses, and even eats. She goes to the dress shop and she smiles at the customers. Colors have lost their brightness, their definition, and more than once she has to ask one of the other girls, as a customer has left the shop with an outfit she'd sewn, "Did that look right?" 

She does as she has always done, even if it has lost all meaning. Anita tells her there is no meaning to it, that meaning is for other people, perhaps. Maria thinks that it might just be for those whom love has not been had and lost.

*

She dreams of Tony. Dreams in the colors she can barely see in the day, and wakes to blackness, to her own fear and grief. She closes her eyes again, and he is there. It is getting harder to wake.

*

The girls at the shop are not sure of how to treat her. She has consorted with the enemy. The enemy has killed her brother. She is to be punished and yet has been punished enough. Consuela, the kindest of them, tells her, "This will pass, this part."

She asks her, "How do you know?" and feels terrible for it immediately. Consuela's husband was killed in a factory accident two years earlier.

Consuela does not tell her to grow up, or any of the things she possibly should. Instead she says, "Because sometimes, I have days where I can breathe just fine, and other days, I think I should consider going dancing again, meeting someone. Because time takes its toll, good and bad."

Maria swallows. "I feel as though my skin has been stripped from me, as though I am but muscle and blood and bone."

Consuela nods, and pats her on the shoulder. "The skin will grow back. It always does."

*

The neighborhood boys avoid her. It's appreciated, even if they are doing it out of fear, and a little bit out of bitterness. She doesn't want their attention, their comfort, their anger, their anything.

A few of the kids who were part of Tony's world—the Jets have mostly disbanded, more a loose affiliation of younger kids now, than the group that killed her brother—leave her small things on her balcony, tokens they have of Tony's, with small notes that say "he would have wanted you to have this," and other generic such things. She hoards these gifts.

The one they call Daddy-o comes to the dress shop and buys a dress from her; the best commission she's ever gotten. New customers come after him, white girls she's never seen, all asking for her, and she knows who she has to thank.

Part of her wishes they wouldn't take care of her better than her own family. The other part of her thinks she has nobody to blame for that but herself.

*

Anita, though, Anita stands by her. Maria is young, but not foolish enough to know that Anita has by far the least reason to. She cannot help asking, "Why? Why don’t you just…find a new friend? Start over?"

Anita laughs like she wants to cry, but Anita doesn't cry, not ever that Maria sees. She says, "You think 'Nardo wouldn't haunt me to the end of my days?"

Maria takes a breath and tells her the truth she's been considering: "'Nardo should have come home to you."

Anita smiles, and it's small and broken, but real. "He wasn't perfect, your brother, but he was mine."

"But you don't have to be his, no longer," Maria says quietly.

"Don't I?" Anita asks.

Maria doesn't have an answer. Not for Anita, and certainly not for herself.

*

Sometimes, on her day off, she goes to the cemetery. She knows the way to his grave by heart, and if she gets odd looks from the (white) people visiting their relatives, she ignores them. Tony was hers, and she is still his. She has earned the right to be here.

She puts flowers with colors so bright even she can see them on his grave and she prays. The words jumble together and she is not certain for what she is praying, but there is comfort in the syntax, the rhythm of prayers she has said since she was a child.

She prays and time passes. Time passes, and there is a day where she can feel the grass underneath her fingertips without it hurting, cutting and rubbing. It is just the tiniest patch of skin, the tiniest whisper of healing, but it is something. 

Tony, she thinks, would tell her it is everything.


End file.
